It is generally thought that psychic ability, often referred to as intuition or gut feeling, is natural in childhood, but as children get older they tend to lose that instinct and are taught to regard psychic experiences as imagination and superstition. Children’s minds can easily accept the existence of the non-physical, but don’t yet have boundaries of space and time and other models of perception that develop when they become adults. Their imagination is a reality to them, and they can see and comprehend things that adults no longer can do. They can cross the line into a fantasy world that adults have long since forgotten and exist in an altered state of reality that Edgar Cayce called unmanifest reality.
Anyone wanting to develop their psychic ability must start by returning to that childlike, dreamy state of mind where imaginary friends, gut instinct, make-believe, fantasy, awe of the amazing world we live in and the endless possibilities of our inner world are natural and real to us.
There are those who believe children are our real teachers and that their first task on earth is to teach adults about aspects of life they are neglecting. It may be something as simple as unconditional love or as complicated as resolving complex situations from the past. Unfortunately, many adults ignore the demands and idle chatter of children and don’t grasp this opportunity to get back in tune with themselves, missing a fabulous opportunity to learn and grow up again.
CHUREL
In India, the ghost of a low-caste woman who cannot find peace as she died in childbirth or during ritual impurity, i.e. during menstruation. Churels are thought to haunt graveyards or squalid places and take the form of a young woman with reversed feet and no mouth. They entice young men to them and hold them captive until they are old. Burying the corpse of a potential churel is said to prevent the ghost from escaping. If this fails, the area needs to be exorcized.
CIA, STAR GATE PROGRAMME
In 1972 the CIA, concerned by reports that the Soviet Union was dedicating substantial resources to what it called psychotronics – research into potential military applications of psychic and fringe science phenomena – began Project STAR GATE, a programme of psychic spying, or remote viewing. The project cost $20 million (£12 million) and lasted 23 years until the US military shut it down in September 1995.
The aim of the programme was to close the Cold War ‘psychic warfare gap’ and discover how serious a threat there was from Soviet psychotronics. Parapsychologists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ of the Stanford Research Institute were asked to look for repeatable psychic phenomena that might be useful to military intelligence. Working with psychic Ingo Swann, the duo developed what they called ‘a perceptual channel across kilometer distances’, in other words, the ability to witness objects, people and events at a distance: remote viewing.
Initially called SCANATE, meaning ‘scan by co-ordinate’, the project required the viewer to describe what they could see at map grid references provided by the CIA. Early signs were encouraging, and the programme expanded. Also known as SUN STREAK, GRILL FLAME and, finally, STAR GATE, the programme was used to help many US military and intelligence-gathering operations over its 23 years. There were a few successes, but more than a few failures.
The team is said to have located Soviet weapons and technologies, such as a nuclear submarine in 1979, identified spies, helped find lost SCUD missiles in the first Gulf War and located plutonium in North Korea in 1994. All in all, more than 20 psychics were employed. With lives at stake, many of them found the work traumatic, some ending up in psychiatric hospitals.
The project was closed down in 1995, probably because the Defense Department lost confidence in it, but even today some psychics continue with police and government work; one assisted the FBI – clearly unsuccessfully – during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in late 2001.
CIRCLE
A symbol of oneness, completion and protection, the circle is believed to represent a sphere of personal power or psychic energy. It is often used for séances, where participants hold hands around a circular table. Ceremonial magic rites are also often performed within the sphere of a magic circle, which functions to concentrate the user’s power and protect against psychic entities. In ritual, a circle represents a holy space that protects from negative forces on the outside and facilitates communication with spirits and deities on the inside.
CLAIRAUDIENCE
The word clairaudience comes from the French and means ‘clear hearing’; it is the ability to receive psychic impressions of sounds, music and voices that are not audible to normal hearing.
Humans have been guided by their inner voices since the beginning of time. The Bible refers to the Voice of God speaking to the prophets and kings. The ancient Greeks received guidance through daimons or divine spirits that offered guidance by whispering it into the ears of men and women. The shamans of many cultures use the voices in their heads for divine guidance. In Yoga the energy centre for clairaudience is the throat area, and it is thought that when it is clear you can open yourself up to inner hearing. Great men and women in history have experienced clairaudience. For example, Joan of Arc claimed to hear the voices of her angel spirit guides St Catherine, St Margaret and St Michael. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries messages from the spirits received clairaudiently were an established part of many séances. Today clairaudience often occurs in psychic readings.
Clairaudience differs from the disembodied voices heard at séances and poltergeist cases, which are considered to be collective apparitional phenomena. It also differs from telepathy, which is the ability to read the thoughts of another person. Clairaudience can be identified in many different ways. You may hear sounds or voices that you know aren’t happening in the real world and that you know aren’t the same as your own inner voice. These voices may come when you are awake or in your dreams. They may be the voices of dead relatives or the voices of spirit guides. Besides voices, certain sounds may provide you with psychic insight. Some people hear ringing in one or both of their ears and
Tuning In: an exercise to develop clairaudient ability
If you’re a good listener, if you find certain sounds and noises unbearable and if you are good at noticing changes in tone, pitch and frequency of noise, chances are you’re more likely to receive psychic information through clairaudience. We all have some degree of clairaudient ability; we all experience those words or thoughts or ideas that seem to come from nowhere, but we tend not to recognize them or we take them for granted. You may wonder how you can tell if the voices you hear are psychic information or your own daily thoughts. One way to figure this out is to listen carefully. Your intuition tends to speak to you in a kind, loving and positive way. Self-talk tends to be harsher.
Find a place where you feel comfortable and won’t be disturbed. Sit down, relax and breathe deeply. Imagine a shield of golden light around your ears for hearing and protection. Next, imagine a tuning knob such as on a radio in front of you. With this knob you can tune your hearing to a new frequency – that of your higher awareness – where you can receive clairaudient guidance. Sense a subtle sound change as you adjust the frequency. Note whatever information you receive. You may receive very little at first, but keep trying, and after a while you may find that your ears automatically tune to receive clairaudient information whenever you focus.
believe this to be a message from the universe. Others hear music, whispers, laughter, crying, bells ringing or other sounds.
CLAIRFRAGRANCE
Often considered a form of clairsentience, clairfragrance occurs when a person smells the fragrances of those who are no longer alive, for example, the perfume of a deceased loved one when no one close to them is wearing or using that perfume, or from which the source is unidentifiable, for example whiffs of flowers or plants when none are around.
CLAIRGUSTUS
Experiencing sweet or sour tastes in the mouth that are not associated with eating or belching. Often classed as a form of clairsentience.
CLAIRSENTIENCE
The word clairsentience comes from the French and means ‘clear feeling or sensing’. It involves the ability to pick up information through smell, taste, touch, gut feeling or intuition.
One of the most important experiments to test clairsentience took place
Investigate your clairsentience
Are you an emotional person? If so, what moods do you feel? Can you feel the moods of other people and animals? Can you feel the moods of specific locations or from objects? Can you feel the moods of spirits who have died with unresolved issues? Do you feel emotions about certain events in history and don’t know why? Do you feel the emotions of friends or family or people close to you? Do you ever get a gut feeling that you should contact someone immediately? When you touch something or someone, do you get a rush of feelings? Do you sometimes experience physical sensations such as warmth or cold for which there is no external cause? Do you often have gut instincts about people or places you know nothing about? The following exercise is a fantasy meditation that is designed to stimulate clairsentience – your awareness to sense, read and respond to the feelings and atmospheres around you.
Find a quiet place and sit down in a comfortable position. Breathe deeply, and imagine you are a beautiful fish in the ocean. Enjoy the feeling of freedom as you glide through the water. Now imagine yourself to be one fish in a school of brightly coloured fish. You swim in rhythm with your group, sense its mood and shift your direction in perfect time and rhythm with the others. Now take this one step further and imagine yourself to be able to feel the mood of an entire oceanic world. You automatically sense and locate where to feed, play and swim and where you will be safe. You feel in total harmony with your ocean world.
in 1922 at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, where a psychic by the name of van Dam was tested in psi guessing games. The experimenters tried to transmit telepathically colours, tastes, feelings and moods, and the results were impressive.
Feeling what is around you is the most common way to receive psychic information. All people experience clairsentience through fleeting impressions but just aren’t aware of it. For example, we all feel drawn to some people more than others for no apparent reason. But if a person is emotional, empathetic and compassionate by nature, and often affected by the moods of those around them, then chances are that psychic impressions typically come to them through clairsentience rather than through clairvoyance or clairaudience.
CLAIRVOYANCE
Parapsychologists consider clairvoyance to be one of the three classes of psychic perception or extrasensory perception (ESP), along with telepathy and precognition, although there is overlap among the three. The word clairvoyance comes from the French, meaning ‘clear seeing’, and refers to the power to see an event or an image in the past, present or future. This type of sight does not happen with your physical eyes, but with your inner eyes. A person with clairvoyant ability can receive information in the form of visual symbols or images. Some clairvoyants describe it as a bit like having a movie screen in your head with images moving across it. Other clairvoyants may see symbols that they learn to interpret, or perhaps people and animals in their spirit form.
Psychic visions typically appear internally, through the mind’s eye, and this is called subjective clairvoyance, but in rare cases they can also appear externally, in the environment around them as if they were real, and this is called objective clairvoyance. Many people think of the term ‘inner eye’ as a figure of speech, but the yogic tradition also uses the term. According to Eastern tradition, the third eye or sixth chakra is the seat of clairvoyance. Located in the centre of the forehead, it is the screen that receives clairvoyance, whether in the form of visions or imagery. In mediumship, clairvoyance may account for the ability of mediums to provide unknown information at séances.
There are several different types of clairvoyance, including the ability to see auras (auric sight), to see into the past (retrocognition) or into the future (precognition). Different states of clairvoyance also include the ability to see through objects (X-ray vision), the ability to see health conditions in other people or animals (body scanning), the ability to see things from far away (travelling clairvoyance), the ability to experience visions in dreams (dream clairvoyance), the ability to see things that transcend time and space (spatial clairvoyance), and the ability to see astral, etheric and spiritual or divine planes (astral and spiritual clairvoyance).
Throughout history clairvoyance has been used and cultivated by prophets, fortune-tellers, witches, and seers of all kinds. Some were gifted naturally with clairvoyance while others learned how to develop it through training. In the 1830s the first scientific experiment to study clairvoyance was conducted on psychic Adele Maginot, and impressive results were achieved. Tests for clairvoyance of concealed cards began in the 1870s with French physiologist Charles Richet, and Richet’s work was taken further in the 1930s by American parapsychologist J B Rhine. Rhine developed a special deck of symbol cards to conduct tests. In the years since considerable evidence has been accumulated to suggest that clairvoyance exists in both humans and animals, although sceptics disagree.
Under your eyelids
People who have strong visual skills tend to be particularly attuned to clairvoyance. If you think in pictures and notice how things look or appear first, rather than how they sound, feel, taste or smell, you may have clairvoyant abilities just waiting to be developed. Perhaps images that you can’t relate to anything currently taking place just pop into your head. The following exercise will help you identify and work with your clairvoyant ability.
Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed, and sit comfortably. Take a deep breath, and feel a protective bubble of light surround you. Let your eyes go out of focus as you concentrate on your third eye chakra. When you are ready, focus your mind’s eye on the images that are behind your eyelids. What do you see? It’s possible you will not see anything at all, and if so, that’s OK. Clairvoyance may not be your strength or you may need to practise some creative visualization exercises. If you do see images, can their meanings be understood? When you are ready, take a deep breath, exhale and return to consciousness in a positive, relaxed mood.
CLOUD BUSTING
Also known as cloud dissolving, this is the psychokinetic ability to make clouds disappear by thought or will. Sceptics argue that clouds naturally appear and disappear every 15 to 20 minutes on their own, and tests on cloud busting have never been conclusive. However, various cultures around the world perform weather control ceremonies in the firm belief that humans, being connected to all things living, can influence the weather. Whether or not this is possible remains unknown.
COCK LANE GHOST
From 1762 to 1764 in Cock Lane, London, so-called poltergeist activity both terrified and fascinated onlookers. The story was written down by Andrew Lang and published in 1894 with the title Cock Lane and Common Sense.
It all began in 1760 when a stockbroker, Mr Kent, rented a house in Cock Lane from Mr Parsons, a parish clerk. At the time, a Miss Fanny was Kent’s housekeeper; the two fell in love and decided to make wills naming each other as beneficiaries. Not long after, Kent and Parsons had a disagreement over money. Mr Kent moved out of the house and began legal proceedings against Parsons. In the meantime, Fanny died of smallpox, and Parsons seized upon the chance to get his revenge on Kent. He concocted a story whereby Mr Kent had murdered Fanny for the inheritance, and in 1762 Parsons began to claim that Fanny was haunting the house. He alleged that Fanny had told his 12-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, that she had been poisoned by Kent. Parsons invited a committee of 20 or more men to his house to witness Fanny’s ghost possessing his young daughter. Elizabeth, apparently under the influence of Fanny, declared once again that she had been poisoned and that the only way she could rest would be if Kent were hanged.
Before long Cock Lane was full of the curious – Parsons even took to charging a fee for people to enter the house and listen to the ghost knocking. There were, however, many who were suspicious of the ghost tale, and their suspicions were confirmed when the ghost failed to appear as promised when Kent was brought to Fanny’s vault. Parsons tried to argue that the ghost did not appear because Kent had moved Fanny’s coffin, but Mr Kent countered this by taking several witnesses to the coffin, which he had opened to reveal Fanny’s body. Afterwards, Kent indicted Parsons and his daughter for fraud. Parsons was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison.
COLD READING
A cold reading is a psychic reading made for someone the psychic has never met. This type of reading is different from one in which there may have been previous contact or one in which the psychic has a certain amount of information already about the person being read. Typically, people visit their favourite psychics on a regular basis, and when this happens the readings are no longer cold, as the psychic becomes familiar with aspects of a client’s personality and life.
Psychic or Fraud?
